The volume of information accessible to users of computer systems, either directly on a local system or indirectly through a network, such as the internet and the World Wide Web constructed on the internet, usually referred to as "the Web", has increased to the point where tracking and indexing the information so that the user can locate a given body or source of information has become a primary problem. For example, users may have literally thousands of documents, spreadsheets, and graphics files directly available on their local system and as many universal resource locators (URLs), wherein each URL essentially points to or is an address of a location of a body or source of information on the internet and contains the information required to direct a TCP/IP based protocol executing on a system to a particular location or resource on the internet and on intranets.
The problem is compounded in that the methods and means in general use for indexing such information remains relatively primitive compared to the methods and means for generating and accessing the information.
For example, it is well known and widely accepted that humans comprehend complex or voluminous information more readily when it is presented in graphical form rather than as text or numbers. This characteristic is, in fact, widely exploited in computer operating environments such as Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh and in most applications programs, such as Netscape Navigator, and even in much of the information itself, which is frequently graphical in nature or uses or incorporates graphical information.
The methods presently in use for indexing information or sources of information, however, generally represent bodies or sources of information, such as files or URLs, in text form, that is, as lists of alphanumeric names or designators. For example, even the computer operating environments and applications programs providing graphical user interfaces, such as Microsoft Windows, the Apple Macintosh and Netscape Navigator, either use alphanumeric designators alone or use alphanumeric designators to distinguish between otherwise identical icons representing files generically.
The systems of the prior art have generally retained alphanumeric designators to represent bodies or sources of information because of the difficulties inherent in representing each individual file or source of information with a graphic representation that is sufficiently distinguishable from other graphic representations of files or sources of information and that presents a visually strong image to a user.
The primary problem in this respect is the volume of data that must be stored to represent each file or source of information individually when there are potentially hundreds of such files or sources of information to individually designate. That is, it has been generally accepted in the prior art that it is necessary to have a relatively large and complex graphic representation of each file or source of information in order to have visually strong and distinguishable representations of files or sources of information when there is more than a relatively limited number of files or sources of information. As such, only a few specialized applications programs, such as the Corel graphics programs and, for example, hypertext markup language (HTML) pages, such as frequently used on the Web, have attempted to provide any form of graphically based indexing of files. These programs and HTML pages have generally used compressed versions of full size images for this purpose, which are in themselves large graphics files, thereby requiring long extensive storage space and long transmission times to transfer over a network.
Related problems are, of course, the overwhelming effort necessary to generate what may be literally hundreds of unique representations to be associated with various files and sources of data, and the inherent problems in organizing and displaying such graphic representations for files and information sources on a typical display.
Still other related problems are, for example, the detection of the unauthorized construction or modification of computer files, such as visual links, and an effective method for providing encrypted authorization within a file, again such as a visual link, without increasing the size of the file or causing difficulties for human and system readers of the file.
The present invention provides a solution to these and other problems of the prior art.